How Much Walking Should You Do in a Walkable Neighborhood?

Walkability is a current planning trend that has implications for public health, traffic, land use planning, zoning, parks and pretty much everything we like about cities. All else equal, cities should favor more walkability over less walkability. Too often planners and urbanists narrowly define walkability as the ability to walk to places where they like to spend money*, and we should think more broadly about what walkable means for all types of folks, but in most cases more walking is better than less walking.

Say you live in a walkable community where you can do most of your errands on foot. How much might you walk on any given day? How much should you walk? Paul Krugman weighed in on this question on his blog. He notes that he walks about 15,000 steps per day, and this is "fairly easy to do." Since most people take about 2,000 steps per mile, he's covering about 7.5 miles daily. This is hard to do!

I posit that if you are walking 7.5 miles daily to go about your business you are not in a walkable community. Mabe farmers and ranchers cover that kind of ground, but at that distance your daily activities are too spread out for easy walking. That distance covered daily is getting close to the hunter-gather period where humans walked 3,000-4,000 miles annually.

An realistic pace for walking is about three miles per hour. This means that 7.5 miles is about 2.5 hours of travel per day, not including subway, bus, taxi, etc. It is certainly doable, but not simply by going about your business. You have to want to do it, and be able to afford to do it. Walking is a leisure good if your income is high enough. You can buy more enjoyable and slower travel and work a bit less. Most people don't have this option, however.

But how much walking is the right amount for a walkable community? I'm not sure, but one place to start is with established travel time budgets of around 90 minutes of total travel per day. This suggests walking about 4.5 miles daily, which is less than the doctor recommended 10,000 steps.  I'm not sure this is right or wrong (it is probably too high as carrying things while walking or traveling with children limits how far and how fast you can go), but a good place to start when evaluating walkable communities. People should be able to take care of their daily business by walking less than five miles per day.  If you use transit and live and work within 1/2 mile of your stops, then your commute includes two miles of walking. As the average person takes less than four trips per day total (Table 3 in this summary of NHTS data, and I realize that national data may not accurately reflect trip totals for denser areas) it seems unlikely that a couple more trips will lead to a few more miles, unless your destination are really far apart.

In sum, to make a community walkable it must have lots of things close together. The closer together these things are, the fewer miles traveled it takes to get to them. So the most walkable places are those where people can access the most while walking the least. If you are walking 2.5 miles per day for all of your activities--which is about what I average about forty blocks north of where Paul Krugman lives (somewhere on the Upper West Side as I understand)--then walking places is easy.

Since each mile is associated with about 100 calories burned, we should also temper our expectations that the marginal increase in walking will offset the increase in calories recently seen. Five miles daily is not enough to offset fancy coffee drinks, sports drinks or even eating out a couple of times per week.

So walking is good and we should encourage more of it through design, mixed uses and street redesign. We should also keep in mind that too much walking suggests that our communities are not actually that walkable and people walk a lot because they can. To be truly walkable people should be able to reach all of their destinations without walking far. Ultimately, however, if we really want people to walk more the best thing to do is get everybody a dog.




*Central Park is one of the best places in Manhattan to walk, but for the most part you just walk about and enjoy your company, the trees, turtles, an occasional bird, etc. Central Park is not a great place to walk because you want to have lunch at the Boathouse. Fancy people take a shuttle there.

What is the Optimal Density for Trick-or-Treating?

Another Halloween has passed, and this was the first year my son went out trick-or-treating mostly on his own. He's five, so we could let him go free in our apartment building knowing he was safe, and there were lots of other kids doing the same. This is a benefit of density for getting candy--his haul was fantastic and he never had to cross a street (though we went to a neighboring building, too. This was supervised.). However, in high density trick-or-treating neighborhoods the entire event lasts about ten minutes, which is much too short. It really doesn't take long to go floor by floor scoring a small handful of candy at each door. In the span of a couple of hundred feet he hit nine apartments per floor! The kid has way more candy than we want him to, and he expended almost no effort to get it beyond dressing up. I think he even stopped at home in the middle to get a new candy bucket. He declared the event a success, perhaps even the best day of his life. It is certainly the best return on effort he's ever had, and he will be sorely disappointed if he thinks such returns are easy to replicate. The whole thing made me wonder what is the optimal residential density for trick-or-treating. It is perhaps less than Morningside Heights and greater than rural Idaho. I think kids should expend at least one candy bar worth of energy getting their loot.

San Francisco Has 38,000 Residential Units Approved

Many scholars and urbanists argue that San Francisco is not accommodating of new development, and this is problematic for the city's growth. There is some truth to this idea,and perhaps the 3,400 residential units currently under construction are not enough. However, according to the data in this San Francisco Business Times there are over 38,000 residential units approved in the city. A large share of these units are part of the Bayview Hunters Point redevelopment.  Whatever the restrictions are caused by zoning, the data at the link suggest that the city is set to increase the total number of units in the city by about 40,000, which is a lot. Let's see if rents come down and the local economy grows as predicted.

Who Buys Manhattan Apartments?

It makes more sense to rent than own your apartment in Manhattan. Here is more. So who buys? In about 20 percent of cases foreigners buy Manhattan properties. This is good as most of these units are not primary residences. However, foreign cash is likely to continue to push up sales prices and rents. Jonathan Miller put together an interesting series of graphs that highlight the relative value of currencies, and apparently buying with Euros is worth about a 25 percent discount and buying with pounds is worth about a 37 percent discount. To me this suggests that European money will flow into Manhattan real estate (a similar situation is happening in Miami) pushing prices higher. Even if oodles of new units are permitted and built I don't see much potential for rent relief for New Yorkers who want to live in Manhattan or the region. Substantial foreign cash will shift resources from oversees, not from elsewhere in the city. I remain skeptical that lower Manhattan can build it's way out of high rents because of induced demand. If the economy craters, then maybe.

I will be curious to see if foreign buyers start to buy in Brooklyn and Queens at the same rate they do in Manhattan. Are foreign buyers willing to trade transport costs for land costs with their second homes and pied-a-terres?

The Downside of Density: Shanghai is Sinking

China Daily reports that Shanghai, China is sinking due to too much high rise construction. From the story:

A diminishing water table, combined with a growing number of skyscrapers, is causing large areas of China to sink, increasing flood risk and endangering the rail network, according to a survey released recently by the China Geological Survey.
The government has already launched a number of measures to combat the problem and a plan of action was approved by the State Council in February.
Research shows the most vulnerable spots are in the North China Plain, the Yangtze River Delta and the Fenwei Basin, covering a combined total area of 79,000 square kilometers - more than 100 times the size of Singapore.
More than 50 cities in these areas are now at least 20 centimeters lower than they were in the 1970s, the survey said.

The sinking cities may threaten transportation links:

The situation may become worse with the construction of high-speed rail, Wu Aimin, director of the geological survey and technology department at the China Geological Environment Monitoring Institute, told the Economic Herald.
As China enters a boom period for high-speed rail construction, authorities should monitor subsidence near railways, such as the high-speed rail linking Beijing and Shanghai.
"If the ground sinks, even by a few millimeters, it will threaten the safety of high-speed rail," Wu was quoted as saying.

As if the Chinese high speed rail program didn't have enough problems. All of the skyscrapers come with a cost:

There are about 65 buildings higher than 200 meters in Shanghai, while Tokyo has 45, according to Emporis, one of the world's leading providers of building statistics.
A study released by the China Geological Survey in 2008 showed that total economic losses due to land subsidence reached nearly 333 billion yuan ($53 billion) from 1956 to 2008 in the North China Plain.

This is an unexpected downside of density.

Can We Build Our Way Out of High Rents in Manhattan?

Zoning controls and land use restrictions limit dense development in many areas. Most of the literature looks at the effect of minimum lot size zoning and concludes that such restrictions create sub-optimal levels of density. In some cases, such as Edward Glaeser's Triumph of the City and his related academic work, scholars argue that places like Manhattan restrict development too much and future residential development should be skyscrapers. As the argument goes the increase in supply will lower prices. This is true if A) the demand for Manhattan living is stable, and B) the average unit size remains stable. I'm skeptical of both assumptions and that we can build our way out of high rents in lower Manhattan. 

High rents are not necessarily a problem for the city or region more broadly. There are areas that are highly desirable--and rightly so--and have very high rents. The average rent for a two bedroom in Manhattan non-doorman building in March 2012 is $4,208. The median rent for a two bedroom in Inwood, the northernmost neighborhood in Manhattan, is $1,600. In trendy TriBeCa the average rent for a two-bed non-doorman building is $8,013 while in Harlem, about nine miles and 40 minutes by subway north, the average rent for a similar unit is $2,132. High rents are really a problem for a few parts of Manhattan. There are certainly other issues at play, but because the super desirable places in Manhattan are so limited I'm not sure enough apartment supply can be built to satisfy existing demand, yet alone new demand that will occur.

As an example, here is a story from today's New York Times about the increasing size of Manhattan apartments. The story is explaining how large apartment conversions are:

A decade ago a typical Manhattan combination was closer to 3,000 square feet. “Now 6,000 square feet is the new 3,000 square feet,” said Kelly Mack, the president of Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group. “The highest tier of buyers is really looking to create these mini-megamansions in the sky.”
Even without combinations, the average high-end apartment size has grown over the past decade as developers have recognized the demand for larger and larger. When the Time Warner Center opened for business in 2001, the average size of its apartments was 2,217 square feet. In 2003, at 1 Beacon Court, it grew to 2,362 square feet. Then, in 2005, the developers of 15 Central Park West built apartments averaging 2,655 square feet, according to Corcoran Sunshine.
The latest is 157 West 57th Street (One57, as it is branded), which opened for sales this year with an average apartment size of 3,584 square feet. In fact, more than half of the condos in the building have 3,000 square feet or more, said Gary Barnett, the president of Extell Development Company, which is building One57.
Yet even with 10 full-floor apartments selling for about $50 million each and a duplex penthouse listed at $115 million, Mr. Barnett was finding that demand among the world’s superrich for the largest apartments was heavier than he expected. The full-floor apartments — all bought by billionaires — are almost gone. So two months ago, the developer combined smaller apartments into four apartments of 5,500 square feet each that could be configured with five bedrooms or with four bedrooms and a library. Asking price: around $35 million apiece.
“As pricing has escalated,” Mr. Barnett said, “you are reaching into a new class of buyer, a wealthier class of buyer, and they want to live graciously. It is not the amount of bedrooms that counts, it is the graciousness of the space that matters.”

Because the demand for apartments in lower Manhattan is global and from extremely wealthy people, simply relaxing restrictions on height or preservation is unlikely to bring down apartment prices. As the price of residential space per square foot declines people will consume more space per apartment. The difference between Time Warner Center and 15 CPW is about 25% of the TWC apartment size. Every five TWC apartments are four 15 CPW apartments. That's just new construction. Combinations are reducing the supply of apartments in older buildings. (I've posted about this previously.) Those arguing that current land use regulations are getting in the way of the market should be prepared for plausible market-based outcomes that are no more socially optimal, at least do not offer cheaper rents, than the current system.

Evidence for Regulatory Constraints on Housing Types

A new paper by Alan Evans and Rachael Unsworth ("Housing Densities and Consumer Choice" Urban Studies, 49(6), pp. 1163-1177, May 2012) provides some evidence for the role of local regulations on residential development. Here is the abstract:

From 2001, the construction of flats and high-density developments increased in
England and the building of houses declined. Does this indicate a change in taste or
is it a result of government planning policies? In this paper, an analysis is made of the
long-term effects of the policy of constraint which has existed for the past 50 years but
the increase in density is identified as occurring primarily after new, revised, planning
guidance was issued in England in 2000 which discouraged low-density development.
To substantiate this, it is pointed out that the change which occurred in England did
not occur in Scotland where guidance was not changed to encourage high-density
residential development. The conclusion that the change is the result of planning
policies and not of a change in taste is confirmed by surveys of the occupants of new
high-rise developments in Leeds. The new flat-dwellers were predominantly young and
childless and expressed the intention, in the near future, when they could, of moving
out of the city centre and into houses. From recent changes in guidance by the new
coalition government, it is expected that the construction of flats in England will fall
back to earlier levels over the next few years.

The authors had a natural experiment where England and Scotland had very different regulatory policies during the past decade. Here is how the authors describe their research question:

The question we address is: ‘what was driving this move to higher densities?’ Is it that there has been a change in taste, with the English suddenly preferring to live in flats rather than houses? This is one alternative, a view which was put to one of the authors recently by a senior planner—“People are buying these flats so they must want them”. The other alternative is that the shift results from a combination of government policies, mediated by economic pressures, a view which might be similarly summarised as ‘People are buying these flats because they can’t afford anything else’.

Through surveys and analyses of housing markets in Leeds, the authors conclude that consumer preferences are not the leading factor driving development of high density housing. Rather, the relaxation of governmental policy is the key influence. The survey respondents were mostly young and single, and their choice to live in a flat was largely economic (i.e. what they could afford) and they hoped to move to lower density housing as they formed families.

A comment that I will add to this is that we know that young people are 1) driving less, 2) starting families later in life, and 3) living alone more often than previous generations. What we don't know is if these characteristics reflect permanent shifts in preferences for housing and transportation. Time will tell. In any event, the paper discussed here offers encouragement for those who think land development is over regulated and for those who think that suburban landscapes reflect market preferences. There will never be a perfect match of consumer preferences and regulatory policies, but hopefully local regulations can be flexible enough to accommodate heterogeneous desires.

What NIMBYism Looks Like: It's Not the Parking This Time

For many urban development projects NIMBYism is a problem, though I am not convinced that NIMBYism prevents regional development as much as for local development (meaning that if a specific project is blocked in a particular location that development will likely occur elsewhere in the region, thus the region is just as well off as had the development occurred in the original location). That said, the other day I highlighted the problem of parking requirements as a tool for NIMBYism, and here is another example from the Twin Cities where a project in south Minneapolis has been blocked by community opposition. Here is a link to the project website, and here is a link to the opposition website. This is a story from the StarTribune about the fate of the project. From the post:

A controversial mixed-use development project in the Linden Hills neighborhood likely won't move forward after an extended and emotional hearing at City Hall Thursday.

The city's Zoning and Planning committee granted an appeal filed by neighbors who are concerned with the project's impact on the area. In particular, neighbors took issue with the development's five-story height -- two stories more than normally allowed in the area.

Residents were appealing a City Planning Commission decision last month to allow the project to move foward. The full City Council still needs to approve the appeal.

Details about the project can be found on lindencorner.com. The building would include 40 condominiums and eight business on the first floor. For a taste of the opposition, take a look atnolindencorner.com.

Spectators packed into the Council chambers Thursday, many donning buttons with a cross through a photo of the development.

"There has now been a rent in the fabric of Linden Hills," said council member Betsy Hodges, who represents the area. "It will take a long time to heal that."

When people talk about NIMBYism, this is a classic example of what they mean. A five story building is too much for the neighbors, and the zoning code says three is the maximum allowed. Some will decry that this project won't move forward, but these units will likely be built elsewhere in the city so the net effect will be about the same. However, a larger point I want to highlight is that many of the NIMBY problems that planning faces today are due in part to the false precision that is prevalent in the zoning codes. Parking requirements are extremely precise, though meaningless, and prevent all kinds of development. Yet planners have insisted that parking requirements are scientific and accurate for decades! Of course the neighbors will argue that parking requirements are important because the city has been telling them so for years. So it goes with height restrictions. Why limit to three stories in this part of south Minneapolis? I bet no one really knows. Yet it is in the code, so it must be right. Except it's not.

This project will not move forward, but it doesn't seem to be because the parking requirements are a constraint if they built a smaller building.  As designed, there were 135 parking spaces included (1.5 spaces per residential unit and 75 for commercial use). This is in excess of the minimum parking spaces required under Minneapolis' recently revised zoning code:

Will there be enough Parking?  Yes.  There will be 135 total parking stalls on site -- 123 parking stalls below grade  and 12 stalls on grade.  This exceeds City requirements of 81 stalls.  Of the excess (81) stalls, 20 will be allocated for extra condo parking, and 25 will support parking needed for neighboring businesses.  Therefore, Of the total (135) stalls, 60 will be dedicated to private condo parking and most of the remaining 72 stalls will be free of charge and for public use.    

However, the parking does have to be underground to fit the site and that may be a concern.

Another complicating factor about NIMBYism preventing density is that the area allows far more units than proposed:

 Is Linden Corner within the zoning standard?

Density:  We are proposing 40 units, however the site's zoning provides for up to 74 units without a variance.Volume:  Proposed building volume (gross square footage) is less than 90,000 gsf -- within the zoning standard.  Height:  The site zoning provides 42’ for building height.  The zoning also provides for the possible granting of a “conditional use permit” or C.U.P. for added height.  We are requesting 17' of added height, for a total building height of 59'.  A C.U.P. is an integral part of the zoning code itself.  Contrary to common belief, not all zoning requirements are necessarily fixed.  A C.U.P. is a mechanism of zoning law which provides flexibility in determining reasonable height limitations, etc.
Does the project also meet the standards imposed by the overlay district?     The project meets the requirements of the Linden Hills overlay district with one exception, the overlay limits the setback of the building to not more than 8' from the front property lines.  As part of Linden Corner's architectural interest, and to facilitate an outdoor sidewalk patio for the restaurant, there are segments of the building that set back more than 8' from the front lines.   

So it's not that NIMBYism is preventing density exactly. The developers don't want to build as densely as allowed and are proposing more parking that required. They could redesign the site, but don't want to do that. It's complicated.

 

 *Special game since it is National Grammar Day. Find where the Oxford Comma should go in the StarTribune text!